September 2, 2011

   

Jesse and Dinga resting after a long day of keeping away all the critters.

Yesterday I actually did most of what I had planned.  Put in the last pieces of wood on the deck and caulked them in.  The deck had looked pretty good until I added those rustic features.  No, not even rustic.  It looks like someone turned a six-year-old loose with a caulking gun.  If I had to make a living doing that, I would have starved to death by now.  At least it is done and today I want to put on the sealant.  I think the sealant will stain the caulking the same color as the wood, so maybe it won't be very easy to see, or at least it will be easier to ignore.

After completely screwing up the deck, I put the new chain on my chain saw and started cutting firewood.  Pretty hard to screw that up.  I cut and stacked two loads in the wood shed.  After lunch I cut one load for the splitter, then I split and stacked that load.  Since we are going to have at least two cords of green wood, I made place near the front of the wood shed to put some dry wood.  In a normal year, we shouldn't have to start using the wood until October mornings.  But who knows this year.  Hopefully it will be dry before we have to use it.  It was 64 in the house this morning, which is a bit chilly, but I absolutely refuse to put a fire in the wood stove this early.  I'll just wear more clothes.  Anyway it warms up quickly once the sun hits the house.

JB spent most of the day at the chipper and put a pretty good sized dent in the piles of branches around it.  He put the chippings in places where we have to walk when it gets muddy - in front of the entrance to his shop, near the path through the grove, places near the driveway where there is no ground cover growing.

Haven't seen many birds around in the past week or so.  They must be down in the orchards eating the fruit.  We always have the ravens though, who fly over a couple times a day.  Dinga watches and sometimes barks at them, and they will squawk back at her.

Looking at all my pictures has brought back so many memories, and I am so glad I inherited my Dad's penchant for photography.  I'm pretty sure he got it from his Mother, as my Aunt Ginny (his sister) was quite the shutterbug too.  I actually have my Grandmother's Brownie camera.  It would probably work if I could find film for it.  Her photos go back to her high school years and I have scanned most of them onto a disc.  As I mentioned previously in my blog, I like pictures so much better than words.  Try as I might, I could never find the words to describe some of our sunsets or the views from Rose Camp.  And it would take volumes to describe just the moment captured in each of my photos, let along what led up to that moment and what came after.  Fortunately my Mother's family also believed in lots of photographs, and I have her Mother's albums beginning from the late 1800's that I have also scanned onto a disc.  They bring to life the history of both sides of my family both before and after I was born.

I picked up eleven more pine "cobs" today.  Yep, sure hope that woods dries before we need to use it. . .